Search alerts are persistent queries held in a system. Whenever the system identifies a new query result (such as a document, list-item, folder, and the like) that satisfies the persistent query, the alert user is notified about this result. The alert user can typically choose the frequency for alert to be sent to the user. For example, the frequency for sending the alert can be daily.
However, the search alert results for search alert users can be annoying to users by (all too often) sending irrelevant results. Specifically, irrelevant results are generated by changes in the search for documents that are not interesting for the users.
For example, a user desires to search for the term “patent” and creates a daily alert for this search in a system (such as computers networked over the Internet). The user will typically get a daily notification with all the results that were discovered in the last day. The system returns results listing every document that contains the term “patent” that was either discovered by the system or modified during the last day. In many cases, certain changes are not interesting enough for the user to be notified about and can be considered as being annoying. The user may consider the results to be annoying when a document can have a change of a security descriptor or a change to other properties which are not visible to the user.